MAYOR George Lee says municipal status has brought governance and order to Portmore, which is this week celebrating its 10th anniversary as a municipality.

“Before we became a municipality there was no order in the communities and people were just building at will and Spanish Town (Parish Council) lacked the resources to manage this large and burgeoning community named Portmore,” Lee said.

According to Lee, the Portmore Municipality has since been able to galvanise the communities into a cohesive force as well as provide enforcement at varying levels. This, he said, is in addition to a beautification programme for the municipality, which has been ongoing and which has been ramped up in recent days.

Now 10 years with its own governance structure, Lee said the time has come to make Portmore more pleasing and beautiful.

Lee and a team from the municipality were discussing the municipality’s achievements and challenges during a recent Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange at the newspaper’s head offices in Kingston.

The recent twinning of the Portmore municipality with the German city of Hagen, according to Lee, will result in the establishment of a major park on lands located behind Captain’s Bakery in the town centre. A part of that arrangement will also see the construction of a solar plant at the Portmore HEART Academy.

According to Deputy Mayor Leon Thomas, the municipality council has been able to create several green spaces for residents and is now rolling out a maintenance programme to resuscitate these areas which, he claimed, were allowed to turn into dust bowl during Lee’s term out of office.

“… So what we are doing now is to bring them up back so you will see those open spaces in the communities and transform from dust bowls to exercise areas with jogging trails,” he said.

The People’s National Party’s Lee, who became the country’s first directly elected mayor in 2003 when Portmore gained municipal status, just last year returned to the seat for the second time after he was ousted by the Jamaica Labour Party’s Keith Hinds in the previous local government elections.

Meanwhile, among the future plans for the municipality is the establishment of a permanent home for the council, plans which Lee said are well advanced. The “major municipal centre”, said the mayor, will be located next door to the ‘100 Man’ Police Station in Greater Portmore.

“We expect to break ground for that before the end of this year,” Lee said, as he explained that the municipality owns some 13 acres of land in that area.

Plans are also in place to rehabilitate some of the major roads which have been in a state of disrepair. High on the list is the George Lee Boulevard, named after the mayor during Hinds’ administration. According to Lee, the Ministry of Transport and Works has approved a plan for a dual carriageway to be constructed along this thoroughfare. He was, however, unable to say what sort of timeline has been attached to this proposal.

But despite the achievements, the municipality has not been without its challenges and one such, according to Lee, is the governance model of the municipality which allows for a directly elected mayor separate from elected councillors.

Lee said while the municipal model has worked well for Portmore, it does have some defects.

One such defect is the inability of the mayor to have a casting vote and this, he said, has caused a lot of problems.

Another challenge, he said, is the “archaic parish council laws” which still governs the municipality’s operations.

“You create a directly elected mayor with much fanfare but you clothed that office with the same archaic parish council law. The mayor has no inherent power or independent budget, despite the fact that he was directly elected so it needs to be upgraded,” Lee said.

The mayor said there was to have been a review in the first three years of the municipality, however, that review was not completed until nearly 10 years later.

And even following its completion, Lee said it is anybody’s guest when the Ministry of Local Government will make that review public.

The current system, he said, gives committees and committees controlled by the majority party control of the council, creating a problem for the mayor.

“If you are going to create an independent directly elected mayor… give that mayor certain level of autonomy and power… so I am looking forward with great expectation to the review that has been done,” Lee said.

The municipality is also seeking help to finish its development plan which is said to 35 per cent complete. According to Lee, the National Housing Trust (NHT) had promised to assist councils with their development plans, and they were among the first set to submit a plan but is yet to get any help from the housing entity.

“The development plan is critical to the process of order in the municipality, so we are appealing to NHT or Government itself to see ways or means to assist us to complete our development plan,” Lee said.

Chief Administrative Manager Kerry Chambers said although the municipality does not have the close to $40 million to complete the development plan, it was still doing further work on it while awaiting assistance.

“We are now doing actual land use surveys in communities so that forms part of the development plan, so whilst we are waiting on the overall funding through councils budget, as well as assistance from Cabinet office, we are in fact still working on the development plan,” she said.